SI29/Our Digital Home

This is a workshop by Youjung, Tommi and Barbs following the practices and research done during Special Issue 29.

Work-in-progress notes

Introduction

Premise: this is to have an idea of what we want to do and for Doriane to revise. This is not meant to be the actual introduction to the workshop for the broader public. We will revise this text and make it more captivating and accessible.

When talking about privacy and social media, we are often led to question our digital identity. Nevertheless, all identities inhabit a home, like we do ourselves. What are our digital homes? How are they and who controls them?

This workshop will be a collective exploration of where our data, our work, and our memories live. Together, we will unmask the marketing depiction of the cloud as something remote and untangible, and we will concretely see that what we call “the Internet” is just a huge amount of more or less big computers all over the world.

Using a local device, we will replicate a little cloud, and play with it by uploading pictures and show that they can be accessed locally or via the Internet. Possibly, if time allows it, we will print the webpage we made and make a little zine about it.

Our digital home is a bit like our own home, we are opening the door to invite people in and to communicate with the world, while when it’s closed we want it to be our safe place. Same thing with ports in a connection.

Place

Tommi’s home. Playing with the concept of hosting a digital home in a home.

Crowds

People around us, or friends of friends who are not familiar with art and technology and who are puzzled by what we are doing in XPUB or in our life.

The context and environment we are aiming for is one of a social dinner or similar, so we will be limiting the participants to 7-9 people. 10-12 in total, including us.

Key topics

• Concept of digital home (subjective, artistic)
• Materiality of the cloud

Technologies

• A Raspberry Pi/a laptop/a smartphone
• Participants’ own devices (phones will be ok, they just need to connect to a webpage)
• Web server: Nginx
• Tommi’s home’s WiFi
• Web upload + publish pages: HTML, CSS, Python (with Jinja and Flask)
• (meta)data(?)
• Printer
• Paper, glitter and thingies

Social practices

• Round of introduction
• Snacks and drinks together (menu: raspberry pie 😜)
• Sharing anecdotes of what digital home means, sharing personal files
• Collective decision on what to publish online and what to keep locally
• Making a zine collectively

Setup

The Raspberry Pi is placed in the middle of the table. A screen and a printer is connected to it. What this Raspberry Pi is will be unveiled only during step 5 of the workshop.

[Screen] --- [Raspberry Pi] --- [Printer]

Schedule

• 🗓️ Saturday 14^th March 2026 from 14:00 to 17:00.
• ⏰ 3 hour

1. Workshop introduction (5 minutes)
2. Round of introductions (15 minutes).
3. Each one of the participants draws on a sheet what they think when thinking of their “home” and another with their “digital home”
4. Share IP address or link (15 minutes). Whenever someone is online the Web interface displace an indication of their presence.
5. Upload files to Web interface and display uploaded images live (5 minutes) (See File uploads on a web page)
6. Go offline (20 minutes) Display on the screen (through the terminal or folder system) that files uploaded via the Internet were actually hosted on a local device
8. Explain in essence how a server works and difference between a cloud and local server (with a graph) (20 minutes)
9. Discuss what to publish on the Internet and what to keep private (only locally on device) (20 minutes)
10. Web to print page + zine making (30 minutes)
11. Feedback, final questions, and gossiping chitchat

Invitation graphic for the workshop

Communication and Promotion

Since we intend to have very few people, we will only reach out and invite participants directly, also because we want to pursue the vibe of an intimate gathering.

Documentation

During the workshop we will document the discussions on an Etherpad. Also take pictures throughout the workshop upon consent of the participants. At the end of the workshop, we will make a collective zine together with the participants, patchworking the content uploaded to the local server.

After the workshop we plan to revise and restructure our notes and make a more curated wiki page, with a PDF zine.

Doriane's feedback

• detecting who upload a file (a question: how FTP account are linked to linux user)
• can we serve through a domain name with a non-static IP adress if it's only for 3 hours

theme and activating your ideas

I LOVE your promise, (digital) identity and (digital) home are strong topic, you should really make them the focus. Since a lot of things has been said about the topic I would inevitably mention the quote

there is no cloud only someone's else computer

Or how we discussed communal (& feminist) servers with Kaa, and we mentioned how naming folder is a tool for living together! In that case I would suggest showing a few communal servers to the participants, to give them an example of people sharing digital home. (please read back this section: Serving Gossips#Communal_servers !)

I also love the little trick you plan to do of unplugging the home to say: omg we all depend on an electric outlet! Doing it in an actual co-location is really interesting.

Now the actual challenge is how to explicitly activate those interesting topic in the social protocol of your workshop.

To activate the question of identity: what about asking people to upload a file that's a bit like their profile picture. So you'll get a collection of something intimate from them, not random, not objective, but like a collective portrait of the group of people: it's them, their identities.

To activate the question of shared-home: you'll need to do more than just uploading file. Personally if I upload a file to a server, I have the impression of just giving something, but not of living there... this is really important to think about! How can you make a small quick collective temporary shared home for the exercise? I would say the best way is to allow them to collectively make a structure with folder: that you all have to negotiate what's the structure (and not just uploading data). Maybe you decide to make folders that are like rooms of a house, and everyone put their profile picture in a room?

file upload

About a flask app that let participant upload files. (putting my zulip message here too) fully deploying a flask app is not as straightforward as you might think. you'll need to configure nginx properly with a reverse proxy and serving the static directory separatly, then use systemclt to make a proper service, then wrap that in a gunicorn worker. i'm not saying you shouldn't do all of that. i do think it's a nice exercice. however i think it's good to understand (and face) the following: you managing to do it, or not, will not make the quality of your workshop better or less good. i see a lot of other ways to do a very samilar workshop, without you needing to battle technicalities, but instead focus on pedagogy materials, metaphores, discussions protocols, social practices proposals, which will impact the quality of your workshop a lot because that's something people can directly feed upon.

Also if you want to have a domain name, which most people might be familiar with, you'll need a static IPV6, which is difficult to have. The easiest way would be to use sergio, since it's already linked to the xpub hub, so you'll only have to connect sergio to the wifi at your place :)

For file upload, i would install FTP on sergio, and they have to install FileZila and drag and drop - it's an occasion to tell them, that's exactly how a lot people put stuff on servers! then because of nginx automatic index, you'll see all the files in a dedicated folder at hub.xpub.nl/sergio/your-workshop/ or in the sub-folder you'll have created together.

preparation for the workshop

So your step would be (before the workshop) (this would already be a little challenge, maybe hihi)

1. install FTP on sergio and make an account
2. test to bring sergio at Tommi's home and connect it to Tommi's wifi
3. test the FTP (full setup) at Tommi's home

during the workshop

1. everyone install FileZila
2. everyone open hub.xpub.nl/sergio/your-workshop/ in their browser! (it's empty, or you put some documentation or presentation for the workshop there?)
3. you give them the FTP password and url and they go in it
4. you collectively make a structure of folder that you have to negociate and upload some form of intimate file
5. you browse the result - that's your digital home!

then surprise

1. you unplug the rapsberry pi, no one can access the file anymore

but how to continue?

Now for the interesting stuffs! I suggested to Tommi that to show that network aren't bound to that binarity online/offline you could show more types of setup from there:

1. you plug it back, but you change the configuration so it is serving on a local network --> they can only access the digital home from Tommi's place now! (over network but without using the internet!) they will see the difference because they'll have to go to an IP (you should also test this step before)
2. you could even then download back the files on someone's computer (through the FTP)? and then connect from your computer to their computer (through SSH for example) --> peer2peer, every of our computer can be a copy of our digital home, the raspberry pi isn't doing anything anymore, your computer (every computer) is also a server

I think you spending time on making drawing, explanation, schematics, documentations, on what each of those potential actions with a server means, using metaphor or sensible explanation is ten time more valuable for this SI than battling a flask app.

making a zine

would be amazing ;) also your poster looks super cool! the simpliest version would be to just use the "tree" command to list your digital home, and maybe print the intimate file (profile pix or else) and just glue them manually next to the tree? (don't try to solve everything with digital technology we have glue and scissors also hihi). what would be mega cool would be to let the parcipants comments how was the experience for them, what they felt or understood, and let each of them write a few sentences and put it in the zine?